Maia Malakoff
b. 2001
I am a textile artist exploring the material language of cloth as a living archive of touch, lineage, and labor. I am investigating the precise thresholds where thread becomes structure. Cloth is my record. My practice begins in a heightened state of attention. Through complex multi-layer weaving and dips into the dye vat, I create tactile garments that ask what it means to make a form that remembers the tension, repetition and process of its own making.
My work currently focuses on the conceptual morphology of cloth—how it is technically and physically built. I am considering and honoring the psychological and physiological traces of my hands. My eight-layer cloth holds exactly 2,056 threads. –Over, then under–, is both a technical mathematical pass on the loom and a devotional ritual. I draft equations to pattern these infinities onto the loom. The fluid plane of fabric is where I map geometric logic (drawing circles inside squares) onto the axis.
When I work with a thread, I am measuring time. When I work with tension, I understand the relation. My resulting fabric becomes an archive of the impressions of discipline, breath, obedience, and care. The residues of contact and resistance carry into the process of wearing and being worn–my cloth is installed in dedication to the body operating as a verb–. I am weaving to locate myself in the continuation of ancestry, landscape, and time.